New NYPD Unit Will Combat Quality-of-Life Offenses Citywide

The NYPD, which under Mayor Adams has reemphasized “broken windows” policing, is about to focus even more on quality-of-life offenses as a way of preventing more serious crime, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said Thursday.

A newly formed citywide NYPD Quality of Life Division, run by a chief, will take shape in the coming weeks, Tisch said, with officers in each command assigned to “Q teams.”

Supervisors will be called to regular Q Stat meetings modeled after CompStat, the department’s method of tracking crimes in real time, allocating resources to prevent more crime and holding commanders accountable for their strategies.

Tisch, speaking at the annual “State of the NYPD” breakfast in Midtown, said that quality-of-life offenses, such as aggressive panhandling, unlicensed street vending, public urination and abandoned vehicles, give “the impression of an unsafe community.”

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“For too long we asked our cops to correct these conditions without sufficient direction,” Tisch said.

“No more. These Q Stat meetings will bring our quality-of-life work into much greater focus, more accurately measure our effectiveness and recenter our approach to public safety.”

Broken windows policing was a hallmark of Bill Bratton during his first term as NYPD police commissioner 30 years ago. Critics through the years have criticized the approach as encouraging racial profiling, with residents in largely Black and Hispanic communities more likely to be given summonses for low-level offenses or arrested.

The NYPD has repeatedly denied it engages in racial profiling and has argued that police are merely responding to complaints from New Yorkers, including Blacks and Hispanics.

After Tisch’s speech, however, Andrew Case, a top lawyer with Latino Justice PRLDEF, said racial profiling invariably follows such enforcement.

“Quality-of-life policing is broken widows policing,” he said. “It has been tried and it failed.”

And Phil Desgranges, a top lawyer with the Legal Aid Society, said quality-of-life enforcement is a “pretext to stop and harass New Yorkers who are going about their day.” The end result, he added, is the “continued criminalization of poverty” with nothing invested in the services that deal with the causes of many low-level offenses.

In her speech, Tisch again lamented the rise in the number of repeat offenders who she says are too often released without bail. She emphasized the need to work with prosecutors and legislators to tweak the 2020 discovery laws, so that more time is allowed for police and prosecutors to gather the evidence that must be turned over to defense lawyers.

She also said a new NYPD Police Academy class sworn in Wednesday will benefit from an improved training curriculum to help them better respond to subway incidents involving the mentally ill.

“Our first priority is to protect life,” she said. “And to put it bluntly, our cops need better tactics.”

At the same time, starting with a Transit District in Queens, cops will more consistently enforce subway rules, including those prohibiting smoking and riders lying across multiple seats.

The move follows a series of initiatives aimed at tamping down subway crime and making riders feel safer.

Last week, as part of a plan announced by Gov. Hochul, the NYPD started assigning two cops to every train in the city overnight.

Earlier in the month, Tisch moved more than 200 cops into subway patrols, noting they will be on the trains and platforms, where 78% of subway crime happens.

Serious subway crime dropped 6% last year. But the system has been rocked by a series of random attacks, most notably the murder of a homeless woman Debrina Kawam, 57, who was set on fire in Coney Island last month, allegedly by Sebastian Zapeta, 33.

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